Peret: a Cape York Peninsula Outstation, 1976–1978 Peter Sutton

12 Peret: A Cape York Peninsula outstation, 1976–1978 Peter Sutton Leaning on memoir, and extensive photographic and written records, this chapter presents an eyewitness account of just one of many Aboriginal outstations that broke away from population centres in remote Australia in the 1970s and later. The context is western Cape York Peninsula, Queensland. The event was the re-establishment in 1976 of Peret Outstation, named after the well Pooerreth near a cattle yard, as a homeland centre rather than the mission pastoral operation for which it had been created. It was, in part, a staged return to the countries of origin of Cape Keerweer people, who had in recent decades become settled in the Presbyterian Mission township of Aurukun to its north (Map 12.1). It was also a time of hope, adrenalin, politicking and pre-eminence, desperate shortages, bogged vehicles—Land Rovers, tractors, small planes—the luck, feasting and starving of hunting, happy children dancing by firelight, old people singing now forgotten song verses, the strains of camp life, and yet also a curiously sedate existence, as yet largely without media, alcohol, drugs or crispy fried chicken wings. Each character seemed larger than life. Perhaps they were. 229 ExPERIMENTS IN SELF-Determination Map 12.1 Cape York Peninsula and Peret Outstation. Source: Karina Pelling, CartogIS, ANu College of Asia and the Pacific 230 12 . PERET Pre–land rights era outstations of Cape York Peninsula Several mission ‘outstations’ (rarely ‘mission extensions’) had been established in western Cape York Peninsula by the 1920s. For example, the Aurukun Mission records mention an ‘outstation’ of Weipa Mission, which lay north of Aurukun, called Myngump.1 This place on the Embley River is more latterly known as Moyngom (Hey Point), a key estate site for members of the Flying Fish clan of Lenford Matthew and kin. Further north from Weipa was Mapoon Mission, which Presbyterian Mission chronicler of the interwar period George Kirke referred to as ‘the station’. It had at least two ‘outstations’ in 1919: Along the Batavia River frontage is found the out-station, where the majority of the married people live. (Kirke 1919: 6) About 14 miles up the Batavia River is another out-station, where there are about a dozen families wrestling with the forest and bringing the land into subjection by the gardener. (p. 7) Twelve years later, Kirke also reported the visit of Mr and Mrs Miller of Mapoon to ‘the outstation on the Batavia River, where several sick people were attended to and helped’ (Kirke 1931; see also Anon. 1932). The vast Mitchell River Delta is south of Aurukun on the same Gulf of Carpentaria coast. By the time Robert Logan Jack published a map of the lower Mitchell River in his 1922 book Northmost Australia, the ‘head station’ of Trebanaman Anglican Mission had three ‘outstations’, Angeram, Koongalara and Daphne, and a fourth, Yeremundo, was projected (Map 12.2). The settlement was later known as Mitchell River Mission and is now a town called Kowanyama. 1 ‘Saul Mammus, Wusarangot H[usband] of Big Archiewald, from Weipa Outstation, Myngump.’ Data card for Saul Mammus, c. 1896–1942, Aurukun Papers, Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies (AIATSIS) Library. 231 ExPERIMENTS IN SELF-Determination Map 12.2 Lower Mitchell River, Cape York Peninsula. Source: Karina Pelling, CartogIS, ANu College of Asia and the Pacific, after Jack (1922: Map F [detail]) This language of ‘head station’ and ‘dependent outstation’ was the language of pastoral properties (sheep and cattle ranches). It was a language established long before the outstation movement of the 1970s. In the Cape York Peninsula cases I have looked at, these older mission outstations were ostensibly based not on the traditional home countries of inhabitants, but on function. There was a division of labour. There were outstations for married couples, for horticultural projects, for stock operations, for isolation of the sick or for the isolation of the well from the sick. In the pastoral industry, outstations were similarly set up for particular functions—mostly mustering points with yards and pens for drafting, castrating, dipping and branding during the season. I saw and stayed at a number of these industrial outstations in the 1970s while carrying out linguistic salvage work in far north Queensland. Before ever reaching Aurukun, I had worked recording Gugu-Badhun with Old Harry Gertz at a mustering camp on Valley of Lagoons Station on the upper Burdekin River, in the time the boss allowed him between a day in the saddle, food and hitting his swag. In 1970, I had recorded the languages of Doomadgee stockman Big Arthur on Seaward Outstation of Iffley Station, out west on the 232 12 . PERET Gulf of Carpentaria, again between mustering and dinner. It was run on the old lines. The ‘ringers’2 (stockmen) slept on the ground on canvas swags— whites and blacks apart—with their saddles as pillows, dining by the light of infernally dangerous carbide lamps, and eating beef, beef and beef, Burdekin Duck (salt beef fried in batter), damper (unleavened bread) and brownies, a traditional bush cake. The only entertainment was talk. By 1928 the ‘Kendall River Extension’ of Aurukun Mission, staffed by Uki and Archiewald Otomorathin, husband and wife Christian converts from further north, was being maintained remotely from the mission’s head station at Archer River. This was a difficult sailing journey through shoaly water off the Gulf of Carpentaria coast. Links were improved when the mission bought a launch for the Kendall run in 1935. Still, Uki and Archiewald had to walk back and forth at times (it is more than 100 km to Aurukun, as the crow flies, including multiple river-mouth crossings in notorious crocodile country). On one of these walks, Uki was killed by a taipan bite at Munpunng in 1948. His grave lies there today. His widow, Archie, as she was known, continued to manage the Kendall River Extension for about another decade after this, largely on her own, administratively. I knew her and worked with her in her old age. She was without doubt a strong personality and might under other circumstances have been an original Boadicea (Brown 1940). At Kendall she organised buildings, food gardens and Christian services, and gathered people for the mission visits when Superintendent Bill MacKenzie came to treat eye disease and other illnesses. All of the ‘settlement’ she and Uki set up disappeared after she left. When the location was reoccupied in the 1970s under the new secular dispensation, with David Martin (see this volume) as outstation adviser, nothing of Archie’s work remained in a tangible sense. Much of the way of life at Kendall in Archie’s time was superficially the same in the Aurukun outstations of the 1970s. But the political economy that underlay it was now radically different. Carbohydrates were bought with small pensions from my tiny store at Peret, where I ran a line of credit with the Pacific Ocean victualling company Burns Philp. These supplies—mainly of tea, sugar, flour, powdered milk, tobacco, matches and ammunition—were shipped from Cairns via Torres Strait to Aurukun, reloaded into dinghies and hauled upriver to Bamboo Landing, then re-hauled into my Land Rover and driven south to Peret. All the protein, however, was hunted. In the Aurukun Mission case, during the interwar period, temporary camps were set up north of Archer River and mostly within a day’s walk from Aurukun for children’s holidays, for isolation during times of epidemics, and for working 2 That is, ‘shit-wringers’, men who wrung the shit out of bulls, cows, calves, mickeys, heifers and bullocks as they pushed them to movement and production. 233 ExPERIMENTS IN SELF-Determination the mission dairy herd, coconut plantation or food gardens. Waterfall, Ikalath, Cowplace, Wutan and Possum Creek were the main ones, and all were on the northern side of the Archer River, where Aurukun lay. A further set of mission-inspired outstations was set up for the mission cattle operations, which were in full swing by the 1960s—this time largely south of the Archer River. Access here was far more difficult as Aurukun lay north of the vast and intricate Archer system. The most substantial of these south-of-Archer establishments, at Peret, Ti-tree and Bamboo, had worksheds and stockmen’s quarters, yards, bush airstrips, radio aerials, generators and concrete-lined wells with windmills to supply water. There were also a number of other, more temporary, cattle-related outstations south of the Archer, such as Hagen Lagoon, Donny Yard, Moonpoon, Kencherung, Wayang, Big Lake and Dish Yard, where cattle were yarded, drafted, castrated and branded seasonally. This work was carried out by Wik stockmen under supervision of a part-Aboriginal head stockman Jerry Hudson, or, later, other mission staff, but no outside stock workers were employed. Stock were annually turned off for market by being walked south roughly 300 km to Mungana railhead, and later, by being loaded on shallow draught boats from the coast (MacKenzie 1981: 174). In the wet season, Aurukun stockmen did maintenance jobs, and made useful things like belts from greenhide. On first arriving at Peret Outstation in 1976, I found such a belt abandoned and hanging on a tree next to the cattle outstation manager’s house. Pecked into the belt was a poignant statement of a stockman starved of company: ‘ASLONE [sic] WHY WORRY ME GORDON HOLROYD.’ Gordon Holroyd, a man from Pormpuraaw, was in a relationship with Jinny Gothachalkenin of Aurukun in that period.3 The old life and the new overlapped in the Aurukun cattle outstations in the 1960s, when two, and finally one, of the last of the mobile bands of bush Wik were recorded as visiting the cattle camps south of Aurukun asking for food.

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